Hi Joseph,
I am glad my remarks prompted you to dig deeper into the problem.
First of all, quoting for me from the references that I gave you and implying that they contradict what I assert is kind of… bizarre.
Secondly, I stand by my assessment:
I was not talking about the “developed Jain system”, but only the “early texts”. Regardless, your presumptions of what “early parts of the Acaranga”, “developed systems”, etc., are, as well as your very preference of the Āyāraṃga out of many early texts, are completely arbitrary. There is simply nothing to discuss here.
You have a whole system of unwarranted, strong presumptions and assumptions about the massive set of complicated ancient texts in languages that you simply cannot read. I meant that this system of presumptions as a whole is simply false.
The Jaina canon is a set of ancient texts, and your excessive “faith” in the Āyāraṃga is completely misguided. The Āyāraṃga is just one of these texts, and it has many layers which can be construed as “earlier” and “later” (but how can we really determine that?), and there are a number of texts that can be said to be roughly as old as the Āyāraṃga, which also have different layers.
And it was mostly early, 19th-century Jainism scholarship that operated in such categories as “older”/“younger” texts/layers, etc. Modern scholars ask: but how can we know for sure?
Quoting to me that the Āyāraṃga is considered old from af Edholm, who I brought you, is bizarre.
Again, this is just wrong on it’s face, to quote af Edholm again:
“Isibhāsiyāiṃ ‘Sayings of the ṛṣis’ is a collection of utterances/bhāṣitas (bhāsiya-) attributed to
sages/ṛṣis (isi-), and elaborations on their doctrines, in verse and prose.”
Yes, exactly – legendary stories about sages saying things. There are not only utterances, but also prose sections that frame some sayings (and create stories).
As for “made up stuff” well the entire corpus of Indian (and for that matter human) literature is “made up stuff” so I am not even sure what your claim is here.
Most of those stories in the text are made-up stuff. Someone simply made up the sayings of most sages. Meaning, they never existed or never said anything like that.
the sense in the sariputta poem could be to cut or reap (whittle away) as;
Aha, so you agree that you have no idea what the line says? It seems so, from your chaotic guesswork regarding the possible meaning of the expression. This was my point, and you proved it one more time: you can’t read these texts. This is my main problem with what you are doing.
And regarding the meaning: no, it can’t be “cut or reap”, because you are quoting the dictionary of a different language (Sanskrit). Sanskrit abhilāva would turn into something like ahilāa in Ardha-Māgadhī.
or it could be non-desire as in
01,068.053a sa tvaṃ svayam anuprāptaṃ sābhilāṣam imaṃ sutam
01,068.053c prekṣamāṇaṃ ca kākṣeṇa kimartham avamanyase
or
01,161.017c kanyā nābhilaṣen nāthaṃ bhartāraṃ bhaktavatsalam
or
06,031.006d0100_01 evaṃ hi sarvabhūteṣu carāmy anabhilakṣitaḥ*
06,031.006d0100_02 bhūtaprakṛtim āsthāya sahaiva ca vinaiva ca*
These are different words that don’t have anything to do with abhilāveṇam.
I still stand that if the Schubring’s edition is correct and the text says:
evaṃ rūvesu gandhesu rasesu phāsesu app’appaṇābhilāveṇaṃ.
It stems from abhilāva – speech/saying.
I also checked Ardha-Māgadhī dictionaries and can confirm that:
abhilāppa – to be expressed in speech
√abhilas – desire
and abhilāva – words/meaning/speech
However, I have checked Schubring’s Sanskrit reconstruction/translation: there is simply nothing there that corresponds to app’appaṇābhilāveṇaṃ (the line 5, looks like 4):
(corrected, because initially somehow misread samyag as samyog)
it says, after listing all the sense-objects, gṛddhiṃ vākpradoṣaṃ vā samyag varjayed buddhimān paṇḍitaḥ.
which can be translated as: a clever person who possesses intelligence would thoroughly avoid greediness (gṛddhi) or faults of speech (vākpradoṣa) with regard to those sense objects. This is apparently how he understands the Prakrit.
(end of correction)
Anyway, this would only confirm my understanding, that he (the practitioner) should abstain from saying (wrong?) things with regard to those sense-objects. Where he (Schubring) gets gṛddhi is unclear; it is not in the Prakrit. It seems he simply adds it according to his intuition (it is like hand-waving…)
Now, I have also consulted my own Prakrit-Sanskrit-Hindi version of the Ṛṣibhāṣita:
this seriously complicates the issue:
because everything differs here – structure, order, number of verses, Prakrit (and Hindi comments!). The general meaning seems to be that he would avoid connection/association with those sense-objects, and vāyapadosaṃ, the fault of speech, is also listed. The Hindi commentary says that it is an example of guarding the sense-doors (इंद्रिय-द्वारा), etc. I don’t have time to go through all of it, but I hope I vividly demonstrated what kind of analysis (and historical, cultural, and language proficiency), effort, and time investment (I spent a few hours preparing that) are needed when we want to understand what those texts actually say.
I agree, we should all be friendly and help each other. You should also understand my feelings when I see that someone, instead of going the “hard way”, that is, investing years of time and effort to grasp the languages, literature and so on, simply “bypasses” all that and produces theories that they would have never produced if they understood those texts, cultures, etc. To me, instead of correcting multiple mistakes and wrong translations and theories, which are abundant on the Internet, it is way easier to simply ignore them and do my own thing…
But if you need some advice in the future, you can ping me here or in PM.
Thanks for this interesting foray! I’ve been digging up on Isi since your translations.
